Indies Introduce Q&A with Tom Newlands

Tom Newlands is the author of Only Here, Only Now, a Summer/Fall 2024 Indies Introduce adult selection and November 2024 Indie Next List pick. 

Lisa Swayze of Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca, New York, served on the bookseller panel that selected Newlands’ book for Indies Introduce.

Swayze sums up the book by saying, “In the 1990s working class town of Fife, Scotland, Cora Mowat is adrift and unsure of herself. Cora’s survival and her path forward are frustratingly unclear as she navigates loss and trauma. When she finally addresses her long-hidden ADHD her path forward becomes clearer, and you cannot help but cheer her on.”

Lisa Swayze: Hi there! My name is Lisa Swayze. I'm with Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca, New York, and I was pleased to be on the Indies Introduce panel that chose Tom's book as one of our selections earlier this year. Tom Newlands is a multiply neurodivergent Scottish writer. He is a recipient of the London Writer’s Award for Literary Fiction, a Creative Future Writer’s Award and a Creative Future/TLC Next Up Award. He was one of eleven writers selected for New Writing North’s “A Writing Chance,” and in 2022 was a featured writer at the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival. He now lives in London, and we're here today to talk about his debut novel, Only Here, Only Now. Welcome!

Tom Newlands: Hey, Lisa, nice to speak to you.

LS: Thanks. Thanks so much for being here. I have to say, we all really enjoyed this book on the panel. We had a lot of conversations about it. One of the first things that stood out for me about Only Here, Only Now was its setting. Your portrayal of Fife is terribly eloquent. It brought to life a place in a time I would never have experienced otherwise. In something I read, you talked about the “personality of place.” Can you tell us about that idea and how it plays into Only Here, Only Now?

TN: I'm really glad you said that, because it was one of the things that I really wanted to do when I set out to write the book. Often, when we think of immersion in a novel, we think of cozy places or fancy places or nice surroundings. But I was really determined to take this rough and ready town, or series of towns, towns that were down on their luck — in the 1990s in Scotland, it wasn't a particularly good time — and I really wanted to immerse the reader in the personality of the place. Both through the descriptive details, but through the characters as well, and how the characters embody the place as well.

The novel was written in lockdown. I live in London now, but I'm from Scotland, and like a lot of people, I felt quite dislocated during lockdown. I couldn't go and see my friends and family in Scotland. When I was writing the novel, I didn't particularly feel homesick, but when I read it back now I think there was a kind of homesickness in it. I was imagining places that I knew, and I was getting right into the details of describing them, probably because I couldn't visit them.

LS: And it was a comfort to do that in some way.

TN: It absolutely was. And as I said, that wasn't obvious to me as I was writing, but certainly, when I reflect on it, it does seem that that was what was going on.

LS: That makes sense. I want to talk about your main character, Cora Mowat. One of my colleagues on the panel, Steve Iwanski from Charter Books, said in a review that “Cora's singular voice and humor are absolutely unforgettable.”

She goes through so much and does some truly wrong things, but we never looked down on her. Where did Cora come from? How did you develop such a real character?

TN: There's a little bit of myself, there's a little bit of people that I knew growing up. A lot of it was an opportunity to be linguistically playful, and just to put some great language and to have some great one-liners in there as well. So there was that.

But about 10 years ago, I went to a wedding. It was a friend of mine that I grew up with in Scotland, and he's living down in London now as well, and a lot of his cousins came down to the wedding. It was the first time that I'd been around teenagers from my own area for decades. They were all going to the school that I had been to, and I was so excited to find out what was going on with the teachers, the place, what it was like.

And I couldn't believe how down they were about it. They didn't want to talk about it at all. They hated the town, they hated their school, and they were just full of questions for me about London. At that point, I was feeling a little bit tired of London, and I was desperate to get some news from home. And yet they were totally focused on things happening elsewhere. And that really stuck in my head, that idea of wanting to escape, of the grass being greener somewhere. I thought, take that and put it into a character, somebody who has that complete restlessness and who is completely dissatisfied with everything around them. And that was really the birth of Cora Mowat.

LS: I think I really related to her, having been that teenager myself from my own small town. Cora is a character with undiagnosed ADHD that has a major impact on her young life. Can you talk to us about why you wanted to create a character with ADHD, and what you were hoping to achieve in doing that?

TN: Sure. I have ADHD myself. I'm autistic as well. And I think in the UK, we're much further behind America and probably Central Europe, in terms of our understanding of ADHD and our acceptance of it. In this country, it's been closely related to class for many years, and so many harmful stereotypes about ADHD grew up during the period after the book, the late 90s and the 2000s. ADHD became associated with class, poor diet, broken families, all these kinds of things.

And I wanted to create a character who was central to all those stereotypes. Cora loves sweets, fizzy drinks, all the rest of it. She comes from a single parent family. I wasn't on a crusade to prove anybody wrong about anything. It was much more important to me that the character was authentic first and foremost, but I was really keen to show something of the life and the humor and the humanity behind ADHD and so many of the good things that come with it. Cora is a very empathetic character. She's very quick thinking. She's got a great sense of humor, great heart, and her impulsivity also helps her step up at times when it's the right thing to do.

LS: Yeah. It's great — one of the beautiful things about her.

I felt like some of my questions were all in the same wheelhouse, but those were the questions I have. I think it's unusual in modern fiction to see a portrayal of a happy, working class ending. And I loved finding that in your book. Did you make that choice very deliberately? If so, why?

TN: It wasn't deliberate, no. The ending developed as I was writing the book. I'm relatively new to writing. This is my first novel. I hadn't really done any writing since high school, and so the process of writing the book, I was learning as I went along. It was a bit like driving the train and laying the track at the same time. I was more than halfway through without an ending, and the ending kind of developed itself as I worked towards it. But it was important for me that there was resolution and that there was happiness in it for Cora.

There was obviously Cora's journey of self-discovery and the relationships she builds. Those things were all important, but it was also important for me to reinforce that, by the end of the book, this hasn't turned into a kind of, happy family, middle class scenario. They're not attending a poetry class or going off into the distance to learn about ornithology or anything. I didn't want it to resolve in that way, so there are some scenes towards the end of the book where we know that Cora is still Cora. Those issues have not resolved themselves. She's found a modicum of happiness and a modicum of confidence and understanding in herself, but she is who she is, right till the end of the book. 

LS: I really appreciated that. I loved this quote where you said that in Only Here, Only Now, you wanted to write “a really vivid book that could tackle some heavy subject matters with warmth and humor.” And I hope everyone's getting this from just the conversation that you really did that in this book.

It's not just Cora, but other characters like her friend Joe and her stepfather, Gunner, they're all handled with a lot of generosity. What makes it possible for you as a writer to do that, to show hard things and difficult situations, but to rarely judge your characters? To keep them fully human and even make it funny? That must have been hard to do. How did you do it?

TN: A lot of people have commented on that, but it does seem to come quite naturally to me. I guess you have to love your characters, and I love all my characters, even when they're not doing the right thing. You're going to hang out with these people as you write the book, as you promote the book. It's been four years of thinking and talking about these characters, and so I know them pretty well, and I do genuinely have affection for all of them.

But I think so many writers are observers of working-class culture, observers of criminal elements, or tear away kids, and when they put them into the book, you can see that they haven't had the experience. It's not based on any lived experience, because everyone is very complex. There's no way you can lift a two-dimensional character and plop him into a story, and expect a reader to buy it. And so many times you do come across caricatures, cardboard cutout type characterizations. I think the only answer I can give is that I've known these people. They're all based on people I've known. 

LS: Well, it's certainly a…I want to say blessing, which is not a word I use usually, but you do have that experience and you were able to put it down on paper for the rest of us to enjoy. 

TN: But I should say as well, I think part of it was just being new to writing and relishing being able to try out descriptions on all different types of people, types of situations, different scenes — it was all new to me. I really wanted to approach each character with fresh eyes and really get my teeth into making them interesting and making them descriptively interesting for the reader as well. So that’s tied to it.

LS: And that's a perfect comment to end our interview in that, you know, it’s a great argument for why we pay attention to debut authors like yourself and do things like this Indies Introduce program where we get to read debut authors who can teach us new things. So, thank you so much for that! And everyone, go read Only Here, Only Now.

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